Show HN: /show-me: agent skill for compact visual representations

HumanLayer released 'show-me', a coding agent skill that prompts AI agents to explain their work with compact visuals like component trees and call stacks instead of prose, available via 'npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me'. The skill, inspired by Coda Hale's talk on intuition vs. attention, aims to improve the readability of coding agent outputs, which developers like former Reddit CEO Yishan and Mario Zechner have criticized as jargon-heavy.

show-me: a coding agent skill for compact visual representations Dex https://twitter.com/dexhorthy · August 12, 2026 · < 7 min read tl;dr make your agent converse visually instead of in walls of prose. npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me Lighter and faster than HTML, good enough for most dev-work shaped problems. Coding agents are pretty much unreadable The former CEO of reddit: https://x.com/yishan/status/2086534431075098628 https://x.com/yishan/status/2086534431075098628 https://x.com/yishan/status/2086534431075098628 Mario Zechner https://x.com/badlogicgames , creator of pi: https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2087068077309542889 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2087068077309542889 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2087068077309542889 Connor from Replicas: https://x.com/connortbot/status/2081881377147109413 https://x.com/connortbot/status/2081881377147109413 https://x.com/connortbot/status/2081881377147109413 Dillon Mulroy https://x.com/dillon mulroy even made a skill, /bro to ask the model to simplify language. https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2079238358358778142 https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2079238358358778142 https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2079238358358778142 The contents are: Restate your last message. Stop using jargon and speak coherently. State it more simply and concisely, like one human talking to another. i am so sick of this agents got more intelligent on paper, but the experience of using them got noticeably worse along this dimension. the thing people used to love about claude - its voice, it's personality, its "soul" has been flushed out in the RL dungeon sol is somewhat less cringe but still regularly hits us with walls of jargon that make eyes glaze over here's a response i got recently. this happens multiple times a day my proposal: show me We've been playing with internal tools to make this better, specifically for coding, and publishing them in a skill we call show-me . It's live in humanlayer today, and if you want it in any other coding agent - you can get it here: npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me If you ever watched coda hale's talk on intuition vs. attention in infrastructure systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e 6gkfTomUQ , it's somewhat inspired: - analyzing information is hard and exhausting - your visual cortex was trained over millions of years to process rich visual information effortlessly - optimize tools accordingly Just as an axe must fit the human hand to be useful, software must fit the human mind to be useful /show-me prompts the agent to use concise visuals to explain what's happening, instead of walls of prose. This is really good for program design https://hlyr.dev/wsff-gh program-design - the phase many folks skip these days, but that I think is essential. You should be discussing the shape of the code the types, the signatures, the call stacks before agents get to work on writing it. The same techniques can also be used to explore large diffs post-hoc to understand what to dig into during review. What's inside component trees Same idea on the frontend, with the state hooks and module boundaries that matter kept in and everything else left out. <SessionPage apps/example/src/routes/session.tsx useSessionEvents <SessionToolbar <RunSkillButton packages/ui I shared this one on twitter back in december: https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/1998968236617199803 https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/1998968236617199803 https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/1998968236617199803 call stacks For orchestration or control-flow work, or just any backend-shaped problem, dillon gave us this "call stack" shape. handleCreateSession validateRequest SessionStore.insert publish session.created AgentWorker.run loadContext callModel persistResult https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2059985696148849025 https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2059985696148849025 https://x.com/dillon mulroy/status/2059985696148849025 tanish https://x.com/tanishqk even wrote a tool to compute them straight from the AST https://x.com/tanishqk/status/2085800689129935342 https://x.com/tanishqk/status/2085800689129935342 https://x.com/tanishqk/status/2085800689129935342 diagrams A classic. If your chat interface supports inline mermaid, these can help a lot. Sometimes they're still slop, but it's usually better than reading words Lots of options here. we like state diagrams and sequence diagrams the most. file layouts A shallow file tree, one line of responsibility per entry. Good for "where does this live" and for scoping a refactor. src/ ├── commands/ parses user actions into intents │ ├── registry.ts name - handler, one place to add a command │ └── show-me.ts expands the slash command ├── sessions/ owns session state and lifecycle │ ├── store.ts SessionStore - insert / list / open │ ├── worker.ts AgentWorker.run - load context, call model │ └── events.ts publishes session.created and friends ├── transport/ talks to the API, knows nothing about sessions │ ├── client.ts request / response mapping │ └── stream.ts SSE decoding, reconnect, backoff └── config.ts env + feature flags pseudocode Especially for algorithmic stuff, pseudocode can be more concise. capture // only if this surface owns focus target = keyboard focus ? focusedBlock : firstBlockIntersectingViewportTop anchor = wholeBlockAnchor blocks, target // type + text + neighbor text offset = targetRect.top - scrollRect.top // signed: place within tall block publish { anchor, offset, scrollTop, revision + 1 } restore snapshot // after editor + blocks exist placement = resolveAnchor blocks, snapshot.anchor exact text match - normalized-whitespace match, scored by neighbor context - 'outdated' if resolved scrollTop += targetRect.top - scrollRect.top - snapshot.offset else scrollTop = snapshot.scrollTop // failure path types and signatures The shape of the code before any of it exists - the stuff that's too internal for an architecture doc but that an agent can still get wrong. interface Item { id: ItemId parentId: ItemId | null // ... } interface Cursor { position: ItemId direction: 'up' | 'down' // ... } resolveTarget items: Item , cursor: Cursor - ItemId | null diff syntax You can also use diff syntax for this, if most of the content is unchanged: For a component change: <SessionPage useSessionEvents <SessionToolbar + <RunSkillButton / <SessionTimeline + <SkillResultCard / For a call-tree change: handleCreateSession validateRequest + enforceQuota SessionStore.insert publish session.created AgentWorker.run loadContext + fetchPriorTurns callModel persistResult + emitUsageEvent For a file-layout change: src/ ├── commands/ +│ └── show-me.ts expands the slash command ├── sessions/ -└── transport.ts +└── transport/ + ├── client.ts + └── stream.ts And for a state or control-flow change, where the shape is pseudocode rather than real code: on save - write content + if content is unchanged + return cached result + write new content + invalidate cache html mockups HTML has replaced figma for a lot of our prototyping work. tbh i never really was super handy with figma anyway html diagrams Sometimes a diagram or explainer is what you need. In humanlayer https://humanlayer.com we let the agent include HTML directly in assistant responses. But you can also just open it in your browser. other inspiration I also wanna hat tip Matt Pocock https://x.com/mattpocockuk for the html explainers that are generated by his /teach skill - very good. go try it npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me After installing the skill, invoke /show-me or ask the agent to use the show-me skill. Point it at a route, service, feature, pull request, or current topic, or just use it to ask the model to restate a question or statement. this is too much content. show me. or /show-me as an html explainer Let us know what you think Tag @humanlayer dev or @dexhorthy on twitter with your results or what you customized/added and let's riff